Napoleon mocked his foreign minister, Prince Talleyrand, saying he was “de la merde dans un bas de soie” (a piece of shit in a silk stocking). The quip came to mind as I watched Trump’s foreign minister, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speak at this year’s Munich Security Conference.
US Vice President J. D. Vance traveled to Munich last year to lecture European leaders. He criticized the EU’s immigration policy, its fight against hate speech, and its efforts to keep the far right out of power. Rubio called Vance “in silk stockings.” He said practically the same thing, only this time it was wrapped in diplomatic gauze.
In 2016, Rubio called Trump a “fraudster” who couldn’t be trusted with nuclear codes. Now, Rubio is Trump’s chief diplomat — and he just allowed the last functioning nuclear arms control treaty between Russia and the United States to expire, without a word of opposition.
Rubio's betrayal of his own beliefs is so fundamental that it has secured him the highest position. In Donald Trump's Washington, a more reliable proof of loyalty is to have principles in the past and publicly abandon them than to have no principles at all.
Rubio peppered his speech in Munich with theatrical persuasion. The United States and Europe “belong together.” Their destinies are “intertwined.” America wants a “revival of alliances” and a “strong Europe.” But what holds the West together, he said, is not shared institutions, a commitment to the rule of law, or a postwar architecture of agreements and multilateral cooperation. The ties are “a shared history, a Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our ancestors made together.”
The key words here are “Christian faith” and “ancestry.” Rubio defined the transatlantic relationship not as a political alliance but as a civilizational blood bond—a closeness rooted in religion and blood. “We will always be children of Europe,” he said. This formulation defines the relationship not as a contract between sovereigns and equals, but as a family bond—inherited, not chosen, in which loyalty stems from biology rather than shared principles and goals.
This is not the language of NATO. This is the language of Samuel Huntington, who spoke of the “clash of civilizations.” According to this idea, the West is defined not by its beliefs, but by who it is; not by its principles, but by its blood ties and faith. It is a formula that erects an imaginary wall around Christian Europe and its diaspora, and leaves out Europe’s Muslim citizens, the secular traditions of the French Republic, and the multi-religious reality of contemporary European life.
Promising a future “as proud, sovereign and vital as the past of our civilization,” Rubio revealed the cards. The future he describes is not a vision of something yet to be built. It is the past projected into the future—nostalgia packaged as a goal.
So, underneath the silk was the same lament that Vance uttered last year, now delivered with slightly better manners: Europe has surrendered its sovereignty to multilateral institutions, Europe is a prisoner of a "climate cult" that is impoverishing its citizens, mass immigration threatens to "wipe out civilization."
“The erasure of civilization” is certainly not a neutral description of demographic change. It is the vocabulary of the European far right, obsessed with the idea of a “great replacement” of the white population. In Munich, Rubio, representing the most powerful government in the world, legitimized a narrative that presents immigration not as a political challenge to be solved, but as an existential threat to the survival of Western civilization. (...)
Rubio’s smoothness made the phrase more dangerous, not more harmless: wrapped in a discourse of alleged shared concern for Europe’s future, it sounded almost caring—as if the Trump administration were merely trying to save its friends from a danger they, being too polite, would not name. But the result is a narrowing of the space for pragmatic cooperation on asylum, labor mobility, and integration—the real work that European governments must do—while providing support to European nationalist parties that they could hardly have dreamed of before Trump.
Rubio’s casual use of the derogatory term “climate cult” also deserves attention, not for what it says about climate policy, but because it exposes the hollowness of his appeal to the glorious future his boss is supposedly building. Climate policy is, by definition, an investment in the future — perhaps the most far-reaching of all, for any generation. To call it a cult, to dismiss climate mitigation efforts as a religious delusion, is a dramatic way of saying that the future habitability of the planet is not worth it.
In addition, Rubio’s schedule of meetings did not match his rhetoric. On Friday, the day before his speech, he skipped the “Berlin format” talks on Ukraine — which included Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, France’s Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, as well as the heads of the European Commission, the European Council, and NATO. After the speech, he flew to Bratislava and Budapest to meet with Robert Fico and Viktor Orban — two of the EU’s most pro-Russia leaders. Trump calls the two ideological allies and recently hosted them at Mar-a-Lago.
So while he told the Munich audience that the US wanted a “strong Europe,” he publicly supported leaders who had built their careers by attacking European institutions from within, blocking joint action, and cultivating ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. When pressed about Ukraine in an interview after his speech, Rubio uttered a telling phrase: The US wants an agreement that Ukraine can “live with” and that Russia can “accept.” The key is asymmetry. Ukraine is expected to tolerate it, and Russia will be happy.
Rubio did not fly from Munich to Bratislava and Budapest to strengthen the transatlantic alliance. He went to show the kind of Europe the US prefers: not a Europe of collective defense and collective sovereignty, but a Europe of governments that defy the EU, court the Kremlin, and call it sovereignty.
Russia and China were absent from Rubio's speech. The enemies he identified were not authoritarian great powers, but immigration, climate policy, and the multilateralism on which the Western alliance has relied since 1945.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was happy to seize the opportunity to declare that “certain countries” that undermine multilateral cooperation and revive the spirit of the Cold War bear the main responsibility for today’s global paralysis. Such accusations would have been harder to articulate if Rubio had not, from the same stage, rejected the post-war institutional order.
Rubio is no Talleyrand. Talleyrand served France’s interests by reshaping the balance of power in Europe, while Rubio serves a president who confuses destruction with strength and nostalgia with renewal. The silk stockings helped to soften the tone and lift the crowd. But beneath them lay the same message that Vance had spoken out loud last year: Europe is useful if it is subservient; Western civilization is defined by exclusivity; a shared future is possible but only under conditions that guarantee it will never actually exist.
The author is a professor of law at New York University School of Law.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2026. (translation: NR)
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